Framing Teachers as Active Agents of Change: Lessons from Haiti and Saint Lucia

• In Event: Champions, Environments, & Incentives: Emerging Lessons from Research on Scaling the Impact of Education Innovations around the World

Proposal

An inclusive and collaborative approach to improving education is important because it harnesses the energy and insights of diverse stakeholders from across the education system. Researchers in Haiti and Saint Lucia are assessing a model of education innovation and scaling that positions teachers as key agents of change within an innovation management system to achieve the desired transformations for schools and learning outcomes. The model combines core elements of the human-centered (user-centered) design approach to innovation and emerging theories of innovation management. As key agents of change, teachers are positioned to identify opportunities and needs at the school or classroom level and collaborate with teacher peers to prototype (test) new solutions. Administrators within ministries of education nurture and support teacher teams and monitor a ‘portfolio’ of teacher-led innovations for strategic insights and promising solutions to scale and further evaluate.
The initial data collection from this research project showed that teachers were inspired to have a key role in the changemaking process. The innovation priorities identified by teachers in Haiti and Saint Lucia were similar to those named by ministries of education. However, they face challenges. As administrators in Saint Lucia noted, a main barrier to the initiative is time- teachers often do not have enough to complete innovation activities. In Haiti, Ministry of Education administrators expressed some doubt about teachers’ ability to generate valuable ideas and described this as a potential barrier to the education innovation model’s success. Administrators in both countries reported the hierarchical structure of the Ministry of Education as a potential challenge for growing and scaling teacher-led ideas.
To facilitate the scaling of solutions generated by teacher teams, researchers have been working with Ministry of Education staff to identify the pathway by which an idea developed and prototyped by teacher teams with positive initial results can be selected and scaled by the Ministry of Education in their country. The presentation will discuss the roles of teachers, principals, district/regional officers, and Ministry of Education leaders in an innovation system as well as the milestones and stakeholder roles along the pathway to scale promising solutions to improve schools and learning outcomes.

Authors

• Angel Caglin, Raise Your Voice Saint Lucia

• Carrie Wright, Wilfred Laurier University